I almost hesitated to post this today for fear that you might think it's a joke, but I assure you that I don't joke. At least not when I'm telling you this.

After my last post where I talked about the basics of the basics, I was thrilled to learn about this handy hint. I noticed that the most troublesome part of teaching iPad basics to a group of people to whom all of the various options and gestures were completely overwhelming, I realized that the most confusing part was remembering which gestures did what, and what combination of taps, clicks, and swipes resulted in what actions.

Me:

"So let's review: Tap once to go Home. Tap twice to view and close open apps. Tap three times to launch Guided Access . . . no wait, that's too confusing - skip that. Now, swipe down to open the Notifications, which you'll probably never use, and up to open the Control Center which you'll probably use all the time. Be careful when you're swiping though, because if you push to hard, you might end up accidentally opening an app or launching the Spotlight Search. So speaking of Spotlight Search . . ."

Them:

[stunned silence]

So how fortuitous was it that Deana Elder, our district Technology Support Coordinator and local iPad expert, came to my office yesterday and showed me this handy little trick! Now I should clarify that she found out about it because a student "accidentally" (dang - where is the sarcasm font when you need it?!) turned this feature on, and neither the teacher nor Deana could figure out what that weird dot was in the corner of the screen.

After a bit of investigating, she learned that this ghostly little dot is born from an accessibility feature called Assistive Touch, which allows users to perform some of those confusing gestures, like double-tapping or multi-finger swiping, without actually double-tapping or multi-finger swiping. All of the most common gestures, all in one place, and launched by the simple touch of a ghost button?! Awesome!